Possession, 2016.
This collaborative installation explores ideas revolving around objects and possession. Integral to the human experience, objects retain a certain connection, implicit or not with people. A used toothbrush, an old wallet, a worn chair, a rusty bicycle—all contain a connotation of belonging to someone, of possession. Over the course of two months 5 artists will investigate how objects interact with their own thingyness as well as the invisible presence of their possessors. Everyday an artist will add personal items and rearrange the installation from the day before. With each iteration new associations will emerge as both objects and artists coexist in the space.
Participating Artists
Melanie bown
Melanie started as a print maker. Her new work uses photography and installation and an awakened perspective to her practice.
stephen Hudson
Stephen Hudson is a wizard and a word smith. During the day he works as a plant operator at a water treatment facility. Sometimes, he likes to play air guitar with his battery powered leaf blower.
Joy bertinuson
Joy Bertinuson considers herself a narrative artist who draws upon personal experience, along with invention, to create works that are at times humorous, absurd, and dark. With a love of art history, she often references, or appropriates, the images she’s absorbed through the many years of looking, and lecturing. As a restless explorer, she’s worked in oil and acrylic paint, as well as with pyrography (woodburning), and has ventured into assemblage. She is currently developing a body of drawings in China marker, and paintings in encaustic, in which she considers boxing as a metaphor for painting.
www.joybertinuson.com
Mehran Mesbah
Mehran’s work is interested in the process of deformation. The effect certain forces have on physical forms over time. Natural formations such as mountains have been of particular inspiration. The result of millions of years of force enacted through tectonics and erosion creates the huge monoliths one sees today. Human societies have encountered similar forces that have endured through the millennia via the malleability of culture and its artifacts, language, and traditions. Mehran’s work exerts natural forces on timeless motifs of culture as a reflection on transience and the indefinite continued progression of space and time.